The best ways to organize pointless meetings

Posted on Sat 25 March 2023 in IT, meta

All good meetings are similar, but each bad meeting is shitty in its own way. I could also say that it's hard to formalize elements that make meetings ineffective, but that's not true: I have a neat list. All summarized to one point is: being lazy. Organizing a good meeting …

Dissecting explanations of Javascript Promises

Posted on Thu 09 February 2023 in IT, meta

What is a Javascript Promise? When I was documenting the Neo4j Javascript driver, I did not know. So let's find out, and in so doing tear to pieces explanations I found online. My favorite past time.

W3Docs

In JavaScript, a promise is a unique object linking the "producing code" and …

I built a Lily58 split keyboard so you don't have to

Posted on Fri 04 November 2022 in keyboards, IT

I had a long summer and decided I would do something to improve the ergonomics of my tech life. Many years ago I bought a Kinesis Advantage, but I was young and naive, and gave up after a week. This time, with all the wisdom of my late twenties, I …

Create a WP test site with lots of users and posts

Posted on Wed 05 January 2022 in programming, IT, wordpress

The following WP-CLI command will create a lot of test data into a WordPress site: 1000 new users, each with 50 posts. Each post gets a random date in the last year and a random post content of variable length filled using a lorem ipsum generator.

WP_CLI::add_command( 'test', 'create_test_data …

How to implement the 6-hour workday in a company

Posted on Sun 02 May 2021 in IT, meta

It is difficult to argue that the current, wide popular 8-hour workday in cognitive-demanding jobs is in any way efficient. It is bad both for employees and employers. Quoting the Harvard Business Review,

Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance …

Setup OpenWRT on Raspberry Pi 3 B+ to avoid data trackers

Posted on Fri 18 September 2020 in security, IT, open source

I am definitely not an expert in networking, so take all of this with some salt. Still, I found it valuable to have my home internet powered by open source software as much as possible, rather than some shitty closed black-box provided by my ISP.

There are already lots of …

A setup for remote piano lesson over Zoom

Posted on Sun 24 May 2020 in tips, IT

First create a new sink:

pactl load-module module-null-sink sink_name=zoom_input sink_properties=device.description=zoom_input

then remap into a Zoom monitor source that Zoom will allow selection of:

pactl load-module module-remap-source master=zoom_input.monitor source_name=zoom_mic source_properties=device.description="zoom_mic"

Then create as many new virtual sources as microphones you need …

Install Windows 7 on a modern, Intel 8th generation computer

Posted on Sun 11 August 2019 in windows, IT

I spent a good week trying to get Windows 7 to work on a modern laptop, having an Intel i3 8th generation CPU and other recent components, such as a NVMe SSD. What I did not know in the first place, is that officially, Windows 7 does not support Intel …

Endless Christmas X-MAS CTF Writeup

Posted on Sat 22 December 2018 in binary reverse, IT, security

This is a writeup for the Endless Christmas challenge, md5 hash 866c92038d6e9fc47db4424f71f6167a (download binary). It appeared in the X-MAS CTF, and it's a Reverse challenge.

Using afl with Radare we can see there are calls to write and execve, both happening in main, a sign that this program creates (and …

Tasks un-owned are task that go forgotten

Posted on Sat 11 August 2018 in meta, IT

If you are a tech company, and your people commit code, then you probably have some code review policy. And if you do not, you definitely should: you want to have an extra pair of eyes on the code that goes live. You certainly do not want a mistake to …

Numpy histogram density does not sum to 1

Posted on Mon 19 March 2018 in python, IT

During a Computational Vision lab, while comparing histograms, I stumbled upon a peculiar behavior. The histograms pairwise kernel matrix - which is just a fancy name for the matrix holding histograms correlations one with another - did not have ones on the diagonal. This means that one histogram was not fully correlated …